Calling cards provide telephone users the ability to charge the cost of making a telephone call to an account not associated with the originating telephone number. The calling cards can be debit cards or credit cards or the bill can be directed to an account associated with another telephone number. See for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,638,431. However, these card often require significant delay between ordering and activation.
Coupling computer and telephone systems to facilitate automated billing, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,640,446, fail to provide billing for prepaid calling cards to an existing telephone account.
Calling cards can be provided on-line and the charges for the card can be placed on a credit card account similar to conventional on-line purchases. However, on-line calling cards fail to provide real-time link to existing telephone billing data base. Thus, charges for calling cards can not be directly placed on telephone accounts.
A recognized problem, therefore, is the failure of on-line provided calling cards to automatically validate potential customer's current telephone billing history. Additionally, current on-line calling cards fail to provide automatic billing to new or existing telephone accounts maintained at by a telephone company.